Occupation Author and Journalist Name Joel Warner Citizenship United States Role Author | Alma mater Haverford College Books The Humor Code Notable works The Humor Code | |
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Notable awards James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, Best American Sports Writing anthology, Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, the Magazine Awards of Western Publishing and the National Awards for Education Reporting Nominations James Beard Award for Newspaper Feature Writing without Recipes Profiles | ||
WTF Episode 521 Peter McGraw and Joel Warner
Joel Warner is an American author and journalist. He is the co-author of The Humor Code, a former staff writer for Westword, Denver's alternative newsweekly, and has also written for Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications.
Contents
The Humor Code
In 2010, Warner met Peter McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado. Warner was fascinated by McGraw's research and unified theory of humor, the Benign Violation Theory. Starting in 2011, the two created "The Humor Code Project," a two-year, 91,000-mile global search for what makes things funny. Their travels took them to Tanzania, Scandinavia, Japan, Israel, Peru, and several other destinations in North America. McGraw and Warner authored The Humor Code, a book about their travels and the experiments they conducted along the way. The two maintained multiple blogs about their adventures on Wired, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.
Works
As a staff writer for Westword, Warner received several awards for his feature writing:
"Black and Blue" (published January 20, 2011)
"Martial Law" (published February 4, 2010')
"The Boy Who Wouldn't Tell" (published April 22, 2010)
"Lax and the City" (published May 27, 2010)
"Trial by Fire" (published July 22, 2010)
"Taken for a Ride" (published December 2, 2010)
"Growth Industry" (published February 5, 2009)
"Cash Crop" (published September 10, 2009)
"The Good Soldier" (published March 20, 2008)
"Father of Invention" (published July 10, 2008) 2009 AAN AltWeekly Award
"You Do the Meth" (published June 28, 2007)
"Mr. Big" (published November 3, 2005)